I’m gonna talk about some of the stuff that happens in this episode. So watch it before you read any more of this.

**SPOILERS**

Okay so conventions are a HUGE part of being a cartoonist. Tycho and I have been to more than we can count from San Diego Comic Con to a comic book convention in a school gymnasium. Running your booth and interacting with people is something every cartoonist needs to learn. You might watch today’s episode and think that we were being too hard on the artists but I can assure you, this was easy mode.

Stealing stuff off tables, does that really happen? Hell yes it happens and most of the time there isn’t shit you can do about it. Kids come by and snag posters while you’re talking with a fan and then run off into the crowd. Adults walk up and just take books because they either think they are free or don’t give a damn. You can shout at them from behind your table but 9 times out of 10 they will just walk away with your stuff. I heard a story that one time Kris Straub chased a girl down and gave her a lecture after she walked away with a book. He became a con folk hero.

Are “booth barnacles” a real thing? Yes and they are much worse than what we gave the artists in this show. Listen I love our fans, I really do but some people God bless them just don’t know when to leave. Our own Erika Sadsad coined the term booth barnacle a few years ago to describe these folks. Sometimes they will sit right down in front of your booth. Other times they just stand there, hovering next to you for hours. So now you know, if you’ve ever been asked by an artist at a con to run an errand for them…I’m sorry, but you are a booth barnacle.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:My objective, generally speaking, is to disappear; my profession is as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone else. I’ve standardized my mode of dress down to eight identical shirts and two pairs of pants. I also have one “nice” shirt, but don’t get excited. It’s not especially nice. And since I wear it every time an event passes a certain dress threshold, its workhorse plaid never quite honors the occasion. I have a friend who takes clothes very seriously. He was trying to show me his shoes once, I assume because he thought maybe I would covet them or something, maybe I would absorb some kind of spore and become a shoe person, which did not happen. I absolutely understand their power, don’t get me wrong. That simply isn’t the kind of power I’m after. I don’t want the kind that goes away when I take it off. The one totem I allow myself is glasses, which are apparently so annoying that Gabriel has decided to let a stranger slice off part of his eyebulb and shoot lasers at it. He’s out this morning tring to This was one of those rare cases where “Gabe and Tycho” cannot serve as true stand-ins, as we both wear glasses. But the idea is somewhere inside the comic, morphed, via the inversion technique.

Robert had Lasik done awhile ago, so long ago now that he has to wear glasses again, which is apparently a thing that happens. He would occasionally wear glasses anyway, for their intimidating effect, which was powerful enough to work on me even though I knew they were props. He told us about the process, which he found beyond odd: the laser man talked to him the whole time his cornea was off, complimenting him on the brilliant color of his iris, now unencumbered by its protective scale. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

I’m gonna talk about some of the stuff that happens in this episode. So watch it before you read any more of this.

**SPOILERS**

Okay so conventions are a HUGE part of being a cartoonist. Tycho and I have been to more than we can count from San Diego Comic Con to a comic book convention in a school gymnasium. Running your booth and interacting with people is something every cartoonist needs to learn. You might watch today’s episode and think that we were being too hard on the artists but I can assure you, this was easy mode.

Stealing stuff off tables, does that really happen? Hell yes it happens and most of the time there isn’t shit you can do about it. Kids come by and snag posters while you’re talking with a fan and then run off into the crowd. Adults walk up and just take books because they either think they are free or don’t give a damn. You can shout at them from behind your table but 9 times out of 10 they will just walk away with your stuff. I heard a story that one time Kris Straub chased a girl down and gave her a lecture after she walked away with a book. He became a con folk hero.

Are “booth barnacles” a real thing? Yes and they are much worse than what we gave the artists in this show. Listen I love our fans, I really do but some people God bless them just don’t know when to leave. Our own Erika Sadsad coined the term booth barnacle a few years ago to describe these folks. Sometimes they will sit right down in front of your booth. Other times they just stand there, hovering next to you for hours. So now you know, if you’ve ever been asked by an artist at a con to run an errand for them…I’m sorry, but you are a booth barnacle.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:“Rayman Legends Challenges App” is a mouthful. It’s not an aerodynamic moniker - let’s just be up-front about that. But as a consolation prize for Rayman’s delayed release, it’s entirely possible that you may find yourself consoled. The challenges change from time to time, and focus on different types of play or amounts of players, but the ones for Murfy’s Dungeon let people get into the guts of the asymmetry that made the original demo so compelling. You really have to take a second to appreciate what they did here, creating a conduit for new players versed in today’s tap and touch dialectic to play with - not alongside, with - what we think of as a traditional player playing in a traditional way. It would be like if you could create the “missing link” after the fact. Performing an incredible trick where you raise a curtain and reveal that, whoa, everybody is playing games and a lot of discussion about what type of game or what type of gamer comes down to the fact that there just isn’t much connective tissue between the great kingdoms of play.

In order to play a game with someone, more often than not, you usually have to be playing the same game. That probably seems like something you wouldn’t have to enunciate, but not everybody likes to do the same stuff, let alone has spent their lives building the skillset required to perform pixel-accurate jumps. The Challenge App, in part, features an “endless run” game where one player is the runner and other player is the level. Like I said, you gotta take a second. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Wii U owners were pretty disappointed when Ubisoft announced that they were pushing Rayman Legends back into September. It was originally scheduled to hit the Wii U back in February but Ubi decided to hold it back until they could release it for all three systems at the same time. I understand the logic. One marketing budget and distribution on systems that actually have a decent install base. It still sucked for Wii U owners like myself who had played the hell out of the demo and were excited for the full game.

There was quite a bit of backlash from gamers and even the game’s developers. Ubi decided to release something called Rayman Legends challenges to Wii U owners for free as a sort of olive branch. It’s out now and you can grab it from the Wii U eShop. It’s an interesting little “app” that serves up daily and weekly challenges and lets you compete with other players on a worldwide leader board. The real star of the game for my family is the Murphy’s Dungeon level. This level plays to the strength of the Wii U by having one player racing through the level on the TV while a second player manipulates the platforming via the Wii U gamepad.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:The second time I went to GDC, we were watching the awards at the end of the show when the same dude kept coming up again and again. Not because he was a weirdo or anything, although that is almost certainly true; he kept going up there because he’d won “all the awards” for a game called Monaco. His name was Andy Schatz, but I didn’t know that before. It became easier to remember each time it was said, and it was said often. That was years ago, mind you. Lots of people make part of a cool game and then the universe conspires against its completion. But he’s brought the game to every PAX since then, always with changes above or beneath the hood; weird, cool touches he put in there just ‘cause. It’s out now, which is cool. I bought a four-pack of Monacos so if anybody tried to weasel out of my heist crew because, myeah myeah, “I don’t own it,” myeah, I can bore a copy of the game into their chest cavity like a corkscrew. Once they’ve healed, the invites are going out. Coaxing/goading/tricking Gabriel into the more out of the way stuff that tends to be my purview can be very difficult; he has his own objectives. There was no problem here, for some reason. Because the visual presentation is so elemental, each heist is awash in your own perceptions. The characters are raw evocations of what you might call the Heist Movie Pantheon, executed in broad strokes. Gabir really wanted to draw the characters how he saw them in his own head, with a special nod toward The Mole, his character of choice. I think his Lookout is especially good also, but he has experience drawing those I guess. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Another Tuesday and another artist leaves the Strip Search house.

We’ve seen in the comments and on Twitter lots of people trying the Strip Search elimination challenge themselves. The idea is you stop the show when the topics are revealed and then give yourself 90 minutes to make a comic. It’s essentially Strip Search the home game and I think it’s awesome. In fact Tycho and I decided to take the Strip Search challenge ourselves at PAX East this year.

We think it’s so cool in fact that we’d like to feature some of the best results on the Strip Search site. Hit this page for all the details and find out how you can share your comic strips with the rest of the Strip Search fandom.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:As a fan of Capcom’s Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and Shadows Over Mystara, as well as games like Vanillaware’s Muramasa and Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown is more or less the song of my heart. It is my heartsong. Apparently it’s not everybody’s heartsong! That’s what I read. They don’t like the game’s ridiculously, freakishly, borderline scarily rendered “woman” and to a certain extent I can understand why. You probably don’t have to guess how I feel about this latest round of compulsory swaying and fainting, so much like an old timey Tent Revival, complete with its hopping devil and its perpetually put upon holy warriors. But let’s try to look at what’s actually here on the plate. What would Vanillaware do with something that isn’t as readily interpreted through a cultural lens, say, a piece of text like the words “Dragon’s Crown”? I’m connected to a global network whose language is light; it’s not hard to find out.

I think it’s fair to say that if it weren’t for the words “Dragon’s Crown” etched at the bottom, many people wouldn’t understand that they were looking at language. Imagine the same refracting prism applied to people, and actually you don’t have to imagine it, because that’s literally the whole game. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Another Tuesday and another artist leaves the Strip Search house.

We’ve seen in the comments and on Twitter lots of people trying the Strip Search elimination challenge themselves. The idea is you stop the show when the topics are revealed and then give yourself 90 minutes to make a comic. It’s essentially Strip Search the home game and I think it’s awesome. In fact Tycho and I decided to take the Strip Search challenge ourselves at PAX East this year.

We think it’s so cool in fact that we’d like to feature some of the best results on the Strip Search site. Hit this page for all the details and find out how you can share your comic strips with the rest of the Strip Search fandom.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:I think that does it for “Emulator.” In a year or so, when your tolerance for familial excursions of this type has perhaps regenerated, I’ll let you know the types of shit my daughter gets up to. She has her mother’s head for math, those inexplicable and sorcerous divinations. I’ve always resented numbers, and really, what’s to like. As an accomplished (and arguably, professional) liar I vastly prefer words, whose precise meaning is almost always in superposition. I took debate, certainly; I can lie with numbers, too. Eventually though, eventually, numbers have a way of holding their shape.

I have returned from the Magic Kingdom demi-refreshed. I only lost my children once on account of my sloth and inattention, which I guess is good. I maintained connectivity with “your world” through various conduits, acquiring information of the type you actively seek out, commingled with the sort of information that will not be denied. It was a banner week for the latter, and if you are in any way conscious Disneyland was an exceedingly strange place to be. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Considering the today’s comic strip is about golf, this seems like a good time to mention the 2013 Child’s Play Invitational. This year We will be playing at Inglewood Golf Club in Kenmore Wa, rather than down in California.

Inglewood is a beautiful course and a great venue for our event.

Date: Monday, May 20, 2013

Time: 11:45AM-1:00PM registration

Format: Shotgun start with a four-person scramble. Team with the lowest round score wins!

Obviously I’m a huge golf nerd but even if you’re not a great player you can come out and have fun with Jerry and I as well as the rest of the Penny Arcade crew. This is our third year running a golf tourney for CP and I can tell you that each year we get players of every single skill level. We have people who are swinging a club for the first time alongside teams of scratch golfers. Regardless of your score, this is always an awesome day.

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:A big part of making a living as a webcomic artist is the convention scene. Setting up and running a good merch booth is huge. In the latest episode of Strip Search we put the artists to the test.